Friday, 7 June 2013

There is a cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The English word is
of the happiest chance.
-- John Keats, from notes on Paradise Lost

The shadow beneath the trees, the cool dappled
Days, marking time passing. Light and shadeNo longer so easy to keep apart, the darkParts invading the bright parts making gray
This moment, always just a moment away
From that moment, the moments bleedingInto one another until at last they stop.

10 comments:

Thanks very much my friend. Just following the stream... but of course it's always such a delicate passage, latterly, such a thin membrane between states, no more than the thickness of a compromised artery wall.

marking time passing, that's it, those shadows beneath the trees when they do that. here the June Gloom cause shadowless days but no complaints, even less membrane

when I lived in Praha, in the winter the sky would get slightly brighter gray during the day and then return to darkness at night, it would go on for weeks or months like that. people went bonkers. blew out the membranes

Roads, rivers, arteries—ways through and across, to another place. This one has a strong pulse, as el médico would say. Calm and resolute and lovely, like the Corots. “The moments bleeding into one another” reminds me of what William James called “the specious moment,” that bit of passing time (about three seconds, he reckoned) we mortals can come to grips with and call it Now.

Calm and resolute, who with so much as the memory of a pulse could say no to three seconds of that? The specious moment, always telling us its lies and then running on ahead and daring us to keep up, when all we wish for is a bit of a lie-down.

Three seconds of eternity, now there's a thought.

I remember once, maybe forty years ago, reading a Playboy interview with Marlon Brando, who always had a disarming way of telling the truth. I don't suppose movie stars can get away with that any more, though of course they can get away with just about anything else.

The interviewer asked why, given that he was so famously selective about which roles he agreed to take on, he had elected to take part in a stinker like Sayonara.

Brando explained his seven-second rule.

When somebody pitched an idea to him, he said, he thought about it. If he had not decided to say No within seven seconds, he said, he would say yes. With Sayonara it was not until one second too late that he realized he ought to have said No.

Keats was making notes in his Milton. He loved "poetical" words. He said Milton had a way of taking a beautiful thing and putting it in a mist, thus making it more beautiful.

"There is a cool pleasure in the very sound of vale -- the english word is of the happiest chance. Milton has put vales in heaven and hell with the very utter affection and yearning of a great poet -- it is a sort of delphic Abstraction, a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist."

The pulse of a compromised artery wall marking time passing.Shade and light, dark parts and bright parts. How ironic to think that when the dark part is gone, so is the bright one, and then....they stop.